How to manage distributed teams successfully

In Hugo’s workshop, participants will create a best practice board in teams of 5-6 people. The teams go through each block of ‘The Bridge Canvas’. The goal is to share best practices, ideas and experiences. Per block, each team selects the ‘best best practice’. At the end of the workshop, each team will present the best best practices for each block.

At the start of the workshop, Hugo shares a few best practices (personal ones + from other distributed agile experts). Each person gets a handout with clear instructions. This includes some questions to stimulate thinking within the team + some best practice examples per block.

Outline/structure of the Session

Hugo will introduce himself, the goal of the workshop and instructions + agenda.

Group brainstorming 5 minutes

Everybody will put his business card/name on a board on the wall indicating on the y-axis the size of the company and on the x-axis the level of experience with distributed teams.

Everyone can individually put post-it notes on the bridge canvas (large size on the wall), indicating what challenges they have experienced with managing distributed teams. The notes are put in each block of the canvas, so they’re grouped.

Concepts and materials10 minutes

Hugo will share some best practices from his own experience and other’s related to each of the blocks of the bridge canvas. There’s a couple of slides and videos.

Teams develop best practice canvas40 minutes

The group will be split into teams of 5-6 people. Each team discusses the best practices they have learned (or which they find online/from other people), for each block. They can use the handouts for stimulating questions and examples of best practices. For each block, the team selects the ‘best best practice’.

Presentations20 minutes

Each team presents the 1 best practice per block to all attendees.

Bridge Canvas action plan10 minutes

Each person creates an action plan for his team. People can take the things they learned and put specific actions in each of the bridge canvas blocks. These actions can be taken as soon as they’re back in the office.

Linda Cook - Why won't they pair?

schedule 2 years ago

60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Do your developers pair? If you can answer yes, then you are among the fortunate ones who have a trusting environment where people feel confident in their work.

Unfortunately there are a large number of development shops that don’t practice pairing in any form.

Pair programming was documented in Kent Beck’s book eXtreme Programming Explained and published in 1999.

So why is it that 17 years later many developers do not practice this simple yet effective programming technique?

This session will address many of the reasons that developers don’t pair. Drawing on experiences in over a handful of organizations and hundreds of teams, an examination of the factors contributing to a general lack of pairing.

Considerations include: environmental concerns, organizational barriers, personal style and experiences all contribute to whether or not people practice pair programming. You will get an opportunity to examine the many benefits of pairing and the variety of methods for pairing.

This session will include a short activity where everyone will get an opportunity to pair using Lego’s.

Steven Martin - Managers and the Land of the Lost

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

There’s quite a bit of guidance and literature for Teams to know what to do in order to adopt and execute Scrum. Nowadays, it’s even more commonplace for Executives to be offered similar workshops, so they have an idea how to support the Teams. But what about the Managers?

From experiences in the field, Managers are often forgotten, or just lumped in with the teams. With confusing phrases such as self-organization and Servant Leadership bumping up against traditional management beliefs and demands from non-trained Executives in Scrum, it’s no wonder Managers can feel a bit like they’ve entered into the Land of the Lost.

In this interactive session, come learn an exercise you can perform back at your organization to help clarify roles and responsibilities of the management layer. Your managers will gain clarity on what they should be doing and what they should be passing on to help not only their teams perform better, but the organization as well. Equip your managers with the knowledge to help them no longer be lost.

As a bonus, the great thing about this Roles exercise, is that it can be used beyond the Managers as well. It’s been applied at both the Team and Executive layers. But, seems to resonate best with Management.

schedule 2 years ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

Traditional Performance Management systems are antiquated and in deep crises. It is time to move to a successful iterative performance flow.

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Traditional Performance Management systems are in deep crises. Their industrial era approach is unable to meet the demands and thinking of 21st century people and organizations.

Join this interactive workshop to discuss how Lean | Agile enterprises can push the reset button and move from an administrative Performance Management process to a successful iterative performance flow.

This is a highly participative open space session and we will cover questions like:

– Why is there a need to push the reset button on Performance Management?

– How do we approach goal settings in an agile environment? What is the best balance between collective vs. individual goals? Can you align individual goals with agile thinking?

– Why is there a trend to eliminate employee appraisals? Are 360-feedbacks the new employee appraisals? Can we still promote people without appraisals and less/no hierarchical structure?

– How valid are traditional bonus models or are there better ways for remuneration and acknowledgement?

Zuzi - Agile Communication

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

You would most likely agree that communication is one of the key success factors in any project, regardless of their size and complexity. This highly-interactive talk shows typical communication patterns, stress the behaviors we keep repeating without even noticing and provides eye-opening insights into the ways communication can be improved. At the end of the session you will understand the most common communication issues and will be able to break those patterns and effective communication will not be just a buzzword without real meaning to you.

Michael Nir - Building highly effective virtual teams

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

The ongoing challenges of creating the magical bond between team members in small and big endeavors can be elusive. What’s more, in the last few decades, this has become increasingly challenging. This presentation provides you with the much needed practical advice on how to create an effective collaborative team environment..The presentation follows the Nine must haves of team of leaders as appear in Michael’s book.The Must-Haves of a High Performance TeamMust-have #1: Develop clear goals and plansMust-have #2: Effective communication

Mariya Breyter - The "Anna Karenina Principle" in Agile

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We can refer to it as “Anna Karenina principle” which is fully applicable to implementing Agile at scale. Imagine, you rolled out Agile in your organization successfully and your energized teams are delivering software on cadence and with high quality. What do you hear next from the management? Let’s scale. Let’s have more of those. So you coach more, establish repeatable practices, coach the teams, and all of a sudden, it all falls apart. Unmanaged dependencies, overlapping product backlogs, conflicting roadmaps bring quality issues, delays in delivery, frustrated teams, and unhappy stakeholders.

In this attempt to apply the "Anna Karenina Principle" to Agile, we will explore relationship between Scrum and DevOps, ATDD and Waterfall, value and cost, "happy" Scrum and Scrumfall. This conversation will make you think and laugh, agree and disagree, talk and listen, but most importantly, it will introduce some patterns in Agile and Scrum that will help you assess what all "happy" Agile implementations have in common from technical and non-technical perspective.

Joseph Campbell - DevOps - It isn't just for hipsters anymore

schedule 2 years ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

DevOps is certainly a very popular buzzword of recent, everyone is talking about DevOps, everyone is selling DevOps packages with promises of having your organization be ‘DevOps’ enabled. However - DevOps isn’t something you can purchase, it isn’t a specific tool that you can grab off the shelf and say that your organization now has DevOps. DevOps describes a foundational series of actions and behaviors that allow for the organization to move bigger, better, faster when delivering products, software and hardware into customer facing production environments. DevOps describes the Standard Work required in order for delivery of finished product to be packaged and delivered. Builds, Deploys, Configuration management are all items that with some minor variation can b automated away - allowing the humans to start to focus on deeper and one of problems in the environment. Performance issues, certain one time failures and other forms of variance can be dealt with when the delivery pipeline defined by DevOps is working.

DevOps aims to provide enablers for delivery of finished product to teams in your organization allowing them to self service, and deliver SAFELY!

So, lets take a look at the basics of what DevOps Foundations and Standard Work are and how they enable DevOps to become a reality for your organization. Lets get things repeatable and automated, so that humans can move on to solving hard problems - and fun stuff.

Jeff Lopez-Stuit, CEC - Local Culture and Global Agility

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Culture existed before Agile. Culture also existed before what is now known as "organizational" or "corporate culture". Outside of the world of global enterprises and systems, culture within a society helps define what it means to be human. Within a societal culture, individuals and interactions really are valued over processes and tools.

Alas, much of the conversation about "culture" for agile teams focuses on how to design or change organizational culture to make it support agile practices. From this perspective, if you have the wrong culture, agile won't thrive. To have the "right" culture, many organizations adopt scaling or adoption frameworks that create rules around communication and collaboration that ignore how people live and communicate with each other naturally.

What if traditions of a local culture are forces that actually help support communication within a global program that uses agile? What if people bringing traditions from their own culture can create something global and distributed that's more valuable than if they worked on their own?

This talk will explore how the simple principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto create a space where people local living in local cultures can contribute greatly to global agility.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Although it's not easy, as an agile community we "know" how to do agile in teams. One of the next challenges is scaling agile to the programm- or portfolio level.In this game you will experience all kinds of manmade scaling issues.Do you have an idea that will make scaling easier? Try your idea in the simulation and get instant feedback.

The scaling game is based on a very popular agile game, that has been around for almost 10 years. This version has been presented at Agile Lille, XP-Days, and the Agile Games Lab Belgium.

During the game you will experience scaling issues that occur when multiple teams work on the same product. Multiple Teams will look for solutions to scaling issues and experiment in an iterative way with their ideas on solving them..

schedule 2 years ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

A hands on workshop facilitating a hands on retrospective team game that aims to help you achieve that feeling of Smooth Sailing.

Attendees will be introduced to this game, play the game, and feedback to the room, with case examples and tips for facilitating the game themselves.

Smooth Sailing is a game you can play as a development team, or, with clients and customers to help understand the product you are building better and, how the journey to its creation is fairing.

This game will give you a new and fun way to run a retrospective to help to gain your barrings, identify what's putting the wind in your sails, the anchors holding you back, and discover your buried treasure. Then you'll plot your course and map a way forward that raises those anchors and catches the tide and a fair wind.

Merchants, Pirates and Cruisers welcome, bring your captain, crew and guests! Join us for some constructive fun, and feel free to bring an idea for a topic you'd like to reflect on.

Teams attending the workshop as a group can work on their own current journeys. Individuals can join groups reflecting on a common shared topic. All puns intended, see you onboard!

schedule 2 years ago

45 Mins

Lightning Talk

Advanced

People are the heart & soul of Agile. Let’s turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations to boost your enterprise agility.

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Inspired, empowered, and engaged people are the heart and soul of Agile – and HR.

Transforming your organization into an agile enterprise is no small deed. And it does not matter where you are on your way towards embracing agility on all levels. There will be a time when you need to align your people solutions with the mindset and demands of agile people and organizations.

We will talk about how to turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations and boost your agility.

Wayde Stallmann - 3 Minute Improv Games to Improve Your Teams

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

You will be surprised to learn that Improv Teams and Software Teams have many similarities; The same techniques Improv Teams use to turn a group of random individuals into Great Team Players can be used by Software Teams to improve Collaboration, Creativity, Communication & Trust.

This unique workshop will have attendees out of their seats and on their feet actively practicing the concepts Improv Teams use to develop Great Team Players. Practicing the four essential qualities of a Great Team Player: Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Trust, not only shows attendees how they can become a Great Team Player, but also how to train others within their organization. This hands on workshop provides actionable material for participants to use immediately upon returning to work. A flier with the top 20 games is included for every participant.

Michael Nir - Convincing the bear - Influence without authority

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

After hiking towards a glacier in Denali National Park Alaska, we were making camp near a small lake. Suddenly I heard my friend saying “Michael there’s a bear here, it is on this side of the lake”. And there he was, a ‘young’ 200 Pound Grizzly no more than 10 feet away… Influencing a bear in the Alaskan outback is quite similar to handling the bears or rather stakeholders of the modern organization – both have their own agenda, and will have you for lunch if they think it serves their interests and appetites.

In this presentation we learn best practices for leading and influencing without authority, including the three essentials model: stakeholder leadership, team orientation and individual adjustment. Do you have the proper toolset to influence the bears when you lack the authority?

schedule 2 years ago

15 Mins

Lightning Talk

Beginner

How can teams that have to deal with large, complex legacy systems get through planning and get to work? The Exorcist was a master at this.

Introduction: Creating understanding through conversation can be very difficult for teams dealing with complex, legacy systems.

Introducing Regan McNeil: Poor Regan McNeil was starting go insane, but a team of doctors and specialists in close, face-to-face collaboration, couldn't solve her problem.

The Exorcist: The Exorcist knew how to have just enough conversation to get to work, so his team could deliver the value everyone had been working and praying for.

Summary: "In life, understanding is the booby prize". Sometimes the quest for understanding can be an impediment to delivering value. Having faith in self-organization, sometimes its best just to get to work

Omar Bermudez - Trust, Canvas, and Games...

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

In an agile organization, TRUST is a must; However, trust does not mean the same for each person. Everyone agrees that trust could take long time to build it, and few minutes or seconds to destroy it.We will mix a powerful canvas with an open definition of trust, and games dynamics to help your team in improving their trust relationships and gaining a deep understanding of trustworthiness.Learn to use the Team Trust Canvas and games dynamics to strengthen your team performance. Participants will learn which factors are essential for trust and how to use this new capacity to create an environment that brings the best of people.I will share with you this fantastic tool, and how I used successfully in the latest years with more than 25 dysfunctional teams. You will have the opportunity to try it during our session.Hand on activity, a lot of fun and serious work.By attending this session you will:

Understand which features influence the team trust

Define the trust and value of teamwork

Create a new Team Trust Canvas model

Use the non-violent communication for improving team connection

Align personal and team values

Understand how to cause lasting change

Improve your team performance by creating a trust culture

Practice useful techniques,which you can immediately use in your organization.

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Performance appraisals are one of the most frequently criticized talent management practices in agile organizations. The criticisms range from their conflict with the agile values to their having a destructive impact on the relationship between managers and their subordinates. Let's talk about how we can transform this huge "individual" process in a "ecosystem" process that respects the agile values, gets people happy & engaged, and last, but not less important, allows to improve the organization ecosystem.I will share my experience and observations from the latest 4 years working on this matter, what went well and how I solved the major hurdles along the way. By attending this session you will learn major resistance point in HHRR department (and why), how to help HHRR department in this journey, how management level could help HHRR department, games dynamics to get teams involved and engaged, and avoid a boring process.

Candy Barone, CMCP, MBA - Say YES to Your Biz & Destroy the NOISE

schedule 2 years ago

Sold Out!

60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Leadership is not something that is born or created, leadership is a choice! Candy's discussion is all about how to take personal responsibility and accountability for the choices you make and how to lead by example. Emotional intelligence is often not focused on enough in business, and as such many are teams expeirence high dsyfunction, lack of trust, and employees not being fully engaged or able to play to their highest and best level. This presents an opportunity to look at leadership differently and build a new generation of leaders.